War, What Is It Good For?

Of course today is Veterans day. A day to reflect on those who've sacrificed for our freedoms. I think most of us tend to think of those in our own lives rather than some sort of celluloid hero.

My experience from childhood is drawn from my paternal grandfather. All I really know is that he served in WWII in the Navy. I don't know where he was or what he did, he would never speak of it to me and I guess that in itself had a powerful effect on my young mind.

As a teenager growing up in a big blue city I tried to cultivate the proper ennui and nonchalance toward patriotism and heroism. It was not the best of times for our country. A weasel named Jimmy Carter was trying his damnedest to get us to believe along with him that America was nothing special. That we would have to just get comfortable with Communism and hostages because, well, we couldn't do any better. I think he has yet to understand that the problem wasn't America, no, the problem was his lack of patriotism and love for this country and the plain folks that people her.

My ennui and nonchalance didn't take. Somehow I lived through those times and managed to end up loving my country fiercely.

Reagan, of course, like for so many people, played a large role in my nascent patriotism. It really was thrilling and strange for a politician to so firmly remind us why America was important in the world. To articulate so clearly that America really was something special.

The seeds Reagan planted came to full flower in the days after 9-11. Like most of us I suppose, I was shocked into the realization that this country really meant something to me. It's not that I didn't know that, just that I had never made the emotional connection before. The rage and tears opened a new place in my heart that had been cold and barren up until that point. My fellow Americans, my countrymen and women lay in that smoking hole.

I watched in awe as brave men and women flocked to the recruitment centers to answer the call. regular men and women, who are always, always the best of us, took up arms in my defense. In defense of this shared sacred dream that is America. They came from every part of this land, big cities and farms, deserts and mountains all disgorged their young men and women who stepped up boldly, placing their lives and futures in fates cruel hand.

Why would they do this?

Our elites often forget the strength and power of a free people. How many times has a despot or potentate laughed and scorned the plain folks as uncultered boobs or dolts. How many times have the same rulers found an American boot lodged in their ass.

I write today in praise of those who man the walls and redoubts. Those who stand in the stinking heat and chilling darkness to keep the peace and freedom.

I write today in praise of those who have fallen in defense of this great land. Whose plain bravery should spur us on to greater heights of freedom and equality. For America is always unfinished, never perfected, for that is not the nature of freedom. freedom lurches and shifts toward the better, step by painful step, and on each of those steps good man and women have stood resolute. Staring evil in the eye and saying in the voice of a Kansas farmer; the Rabbi's son; the butchers daughter; this far and no more.

This voice is not the voice of the action hero. It is often stained with fear, trembling in its own mortality, but it stands and says "This far and no further!"

I write today with tears in my eyes for those brave sons of bitches fighting and dying and loving a people in a foreign land. People they would never have known in their every day lives. Unlovely people whose souls were bent under years of tyrannical pressure into shapes unknowable to a free people. Souls that substituted yes for no, truth for lies until they no longer knew up from down.

I write today in praise of those who have lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers in this struggle. A struggle not for gain or privilege, but for honor and right.

I write today in praise of the American soldier.

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